Qian 乾 is three unbroken lines (☰): Heaven, the element Metal, and in the Shuo Gua’s family of trigrams the father. It appears in Xuan Kong Da Gua twice over — as the northwest palace of the Later Heaven compass, where it names three of the 24 mountains, and in its Early Heaven place in the south, which is where it stands on the 64-hexagram ring.
Its two places on the compass
In the Later Heaven arrangement, which divides the 24 mountains into eight palaces, Qian holds the northwest: the mountains 戌 Xu, 乾 Qian and 亥 Hai, from 292.5° to 337.5°. In the Early Heaven arrangement it stands in the south, and its Early Heaven number is 9. That number matters on the ring: every hexagram with Qian as its upper trigram carries a 卦氣 of 9, whose He Tu element (四九為友) is Metal.
Its block of the ring, and the hexagrams it tops
On the 64-hexagram ring the eight hexagrams with Qian as their lower trigram sit together, from 135° to 180°, ending at due south where Qian stands in the Early Heaven order: 泰, 大畜, 需, 小畜, 大壯, 大有, 夬 and 乾 itself (174.375°–180°). They carry one of each 卦運 — 9, 4, 3, 8, 2, 7, 6 and 1. The eight hexagrams Qian tops are spread one to a block: 無妄, 同人, 履, 乾, 姤, 訟, 遯 and 否, all with 卦氣 9.
Reading it for a house
A house facing between 135° and 180° has a facing hexagram with Qian as its lower trigram, and — the pair being inverses — a sitting hexagram with 坤 as its lower trigram, from the block opposite. A house sitting in the northwest palace (facing roughly southeast) reads its water from Qian in the Dragon Gate formula. The Shuo Gua’s associations — the father, the head, the sovereign — belong to the trigram’s classical symbolism; the ring reading KAXANTA computes does not weigh them.
References
Canonical sources that inform this guide.
- Feng Shui/Xuan Kong Da Gua/Compass Location · WEBSITE
- Feng Shui/Xuan Kong Da Gua/Binary Representation of the 64 Hexagrams · WEBSITE
- Bagua (Eight Trigrams) · WIKIPEDIA
- I Ching · WIKIPEDIA